Is Zoom Secure?

The "Zoom-Bombing" issue was the result of meetings being set up in an open way, which enable troublemakers to jump in uninvited. Zoom has since changed the default settings so that passwords are required by default now. That's something that can be fixed in the configuration and education. It's important to note that they increased from 10 million to 200 million active users between December to March. Wow.

However, Zoom also has a handful of vulnerabilities that they need to address, and they have reportedly paused all new features for 90 days and are refocusing on security. We assume that fixing these issues will be a priority so they can sustain all this growth.

Part of what made Zoom so successful is that it is arguably the easiest to use. However, easy and secure are often at odds. People were setting up meetings using their personal meeting IDs, with no password. What that means is, anyone on the whole internet (it's pretty big) can jump on your call uninvited if you launch a meeting that way. Very easy for both the people you want in the meeting and those that you do not.

So, Zoom-Bombing is not a platform issue per se, but rather, an issue with many people joining a platform and launching meetings without the correct orientation. A problem of both users and the platform's orientation, training and default settings. Note that they changed the default to require a password a couple days back.

For the record, we are currently using Zoom all the time, but anticipate transitioning exclusively to Teams in the short term. Why haven't we yet? It's still just a little bit bumpy for non-Teams users to join. It works, but it's just not quite as easy for many people. Everyone is always able to get on our Zoom calls. We predict that friction will be addressed as Microsoft continues to develop the platform.

If you do want to look around for alternatives, here's an article by the folks over at The Verge to check out.